No Time for Secrets

When I get a phone bill, I'm foolish to pay it without thoroughly understanding what every charge means, but I usually pay it anyway. The bill is designed to look complicated, and the phone company depends on me not to care enough to question the charges—just pay up. Time's a-wasting, the due date's approaching, and I don't care—so I go ahead and pay it. That philosophy has gotten me through my life just fine, thank you.

But the only thing my body has in common with my telephone is a due date. I can't simply ignore what the numbers on my lab reports mean. My body depends on me to care and be informed about what keeps it running; my phone, on the other hand, will still operate even if I'm foolhardy enough not to care what all the numbers mean, as long as I just pay up.

For years, I left it to my doctor to interpret for me what "all those numbers" on my lab reports meant, and to call me with the results. If I didn't hear from the doctor, I could just assume that everything was normal. The policy of most doctors' offices and hospitals has been to send copies of records off to various specialists—never to me, the patient. And if I happen to obtain a copy "to keep on file," the results have not been thoroughly explained—I've left all of that information to the experts to decide what's important for me to understand. 

But, even by the most experienced medical staff, important details can too often be overlooked. The concept of "checks and balances" is out the window: too time-consuming and costly in a world where doctors are squeezing in as many patients in one day as possible. 

Without question, too much information in our secretive society can sometimes be dangerous, especially in the hands of someone with an overactive imagination: one sees or hears the word "growth" or "mass" or "lesion," and then suddenly he's breaking into a sweat and reviewing his will. Internet access has provided us with the ability to collect medical information on everything from hangnails to brain surgery, sometimes to our peril. But when doctors openly communicate information on our health, with no secrets, nothing is left to the imagination—there is no need to be our own interpreters. We have all the necessary information to make educated decisions about our bodies.